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Naval history and development since the Weltkrieg
The Second Battle of Jutland In late 1919, Britain, faced with a rapidly worsening strategic situation, decides to make a bold effort to tip the scales, with a major naval sortie seeking to draw the German Hochseeflotte out and defeat it decisively. While the Germans are, indeed, drawn into combat, the result is far from that desired by the British. The first major contact in the battle occurs between the two nation’s battlecruiser forces, and, while the British have made significant efforts to address issues revealed at the First Battle of Jutland, those prove chimeric: the German battlecruiser force, now reinforced by the Mackensen class, proves far more combat-capable than its British counterpart. Several British battlecruisers are outright destroyed, as German shells find their marks, penetrating the weaker British armor and, in some instances, triggering massive secondary explosions. One of the brand-new Admiral class ships is amongst the fallen, and Lord Fisher’s “large light cruisers” are ravaged as they try to intervene and assist the faltering British forces. Trying to cover the withdrawal of their battlecruisers, the British Dreadnoughts join the fray, and are answered by the their German counterparts. Again, the German ships perform, one-for-one, significantly better than the British expect, with the newest German Dreadnoughts proving very formidable indeed. As the battle rages, while the Germans give better than they receive, neither side is able to deal a decisive blow. Several Dreadnoughts are badly damaged, and one or two are even sunk, but the most significant occurrence at this stage of the battle, the one that will have the greatest long-term consequences, is the damaging of the SMS Sachsen, which has her rudders temporarily incapacitated, resulting in the Sachsen veering out of the main fray of the battle. The damage itself is not the important issue though, but rather, its cause, as the Sachsen, under gunfire at the time, was also struck by an aerial torpedo dropped from a British aircraft. Frederick Rutland, who already had a number of important naval aviation “firsts” under his belt, flew a Short Type 184, as in First Jutland, but carrying a torpedo this time, and, spotting the Sachsen in combat with British ships, attacked her, successfully scoring a hit. The British proponents of air power seize upon this after the battle, crediting the jamming of the rudders to the torpedo strike, eventually leading to the focus of the Union of Britain's navy on aircraft carriers (and significantly influencing Japanese doctrinal thought as well). The Germans, while repairing the Sachsen after the battle, determine that the torpedo actually did negligible damage, and that gunfire was the causal factor; German proponents of the ‘big-gun school’ reference this as evidence of the impotence of aircraft against capital ships, which provides them with support in their post-war neglect of naval aviation for non-reconnaissance tasks. Regardless, the battle ends with both navies disengaging, and, in later analysis, is seen as a solid defeat for the British Navy. The concept of more lightly armed and armored battlecruisers is soundly discredited, and the evolution of battlecruisers is set along the “German path” toward becoming “fast battleships”. The Dreadnought Race After the war, international tensions remain higher than they have ever been. Britain and Germany may have signed a white peace, but they are still in direct competition with each other. Japan has broken away from the Entente, as her interests no longer align with those of Britain. The USA has remained neutral, and her Pacific holdings put her at odds with Japan, Britain, and Germany. The bipolar world of the Weltkrieg has fallen apart into a mess of competing Great Powers, and their arena is the ocean. All of the Great Powers seek to obtain naval dominance, or failing that, to at least not fall behind the others. Capital ships are commissioned everywhere, in large numbers. Both of the Battles of Jutland are being studied and analysed by naval planners the world over, and several lessons are taken away from it. In particular, the performance of the dreadnought battleships draws much interest, and dreadnoughts quickly gain a reputation as nigh-unkillable floating fortresses, which can go toe-to-toe with any enemy ship, shrugging off even the heaviest incoming fire. Larger, more heavily armed and armored, battlecruisers are also ordered, and the evolution of battlecruisers into “fast battleships” is realized. The British and Japanese begin to take naval aviation seriously, though still at this juncture as an assisting force to capital ships, while the Germans are convinced that the value of naval aviation is almost exclusively in reconnaissance. A ship that can survive anything is of no use if it cannot kill anything either. Although dreadnoughts have proven to be deadly opponents to smaller vessels, even to battlecruisers, they have demonstrated great difficulty in inflicting such killing blows against other dreadnoughts. As such, the new dreadnought designs drawn up after Second Jutland tend to feature more and heavier guns than their predecessors. In order to keep up with these developments in enemy fleets, the ships’ armour is also increased. This leads to a rapid escalation in armour and armament, and dreadnoughts get ever bigger and more expensive. Economic toll of the Dreadnought Race All this is not without its cost, of course. The German economy is doing well enough, and it is capable of building several dreadnoughts per year without too much issue. In Britain, however, the economy is struggling to recover from five years of pointless war, and the strain of trying to maintain the strongest fleet in the world is not helping matters. It is also decidedly unpopular with the general population, who, after having shouldered the burden of five years of war, are now expected to continue to feed the military machine in peacetime. The rift in society widens, and although it is by no means the primary cause, the deeply unpopular dreadnought race is still a major contributing factor in the Revolution of 1925, where the people’s displeasure boils over. In the USA, the fleet expansion is not nearly so controversial, but it is still putting significant pressure on the economy. With half of Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia now under German control, Germany is occupying an increasingly dominant position in the international market, all but closing off American trade with these regions. The Second French Revolution also cost the US one of its main trading partners, as the Commune is wary of capitalist trade and the rump Republic only controls a fraction of the economy it did before. US trade interests are lagging, and the economy is slowly starting to buckle under the strain, until the British Revolution removes another major trading partner and the whole US economy implodes. Japan is similarly struggling to keep up, and despite increasingly ambitious fleet plans being drawn up, there is little the country can do beyond simply trying not to fall too far behind. After truly extreme investment of resources, relative to total economic size, the Japanese are nonetheless not able to stand in the face of the intervention in China, which results in a major blow to the prestige of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and allow the Imperial Japanese Army to begin more effectively fighting for a share of the budget. Combined with an overall shrinking of the military budget, as the realities of the economic situation are finally inescapable, the net effect is to end Japan’s part of the “race” in the later half of the 20s, as their ship construction slows to a much less frantic pace. In the end, after 1925, only Germany remains standing, and even Germany, feeling not inconsiderable strain from the intense costs, chooses to reduce its capital ship construction, now that the Dreadnought Race has been well and truly won. This does not mean the end of naval construction, however, or even of capital ship construction. Another detail is the reemergence of the armoured cruiser; though these vessels were deemed obsolete with the advent of the battlecruiser, the concept is given new life by shipyards that find they have a surplus of lower-calibre old battleship guns, especially in Ukraine and Italy. New hulls are built, slightly larger and better-armoured than a standard cruiser, almost invariably armed with two main turrets with two guns each, weaponry that is considered obsolete for true modern capital ships but which can still be very dangerous. The resulting ships tend to be on the slow side, and rather poorly armoured compared to proper capital ships, but they are not that much more expensive than cruisers and pack a good amount of firepower in a small package. These vessels quickly gain popularity among smaller, second- and third-rate naval powers, who are unable to afford modern dreadnoughts but who can easily commission armoured cruisers in order to at least field capital-grade firepower on a budget. Finally, however, the crowning achievement of post-Race interwar shipbuilding is a one-off German dreadnought, the Kaiser Wilhelm (nicknamed the Kaiser’s Willy by the British), ordered by the Kaiser himself as a prestige project, seeking to own the largest, most powerful warship in history, demonstrating German superiority. She is a true monster, armed with an unprecedented 20” main battery, easily capable (on paper, at least) of going toe-to-toe with any other dreadnought and emerging victorious, while also being faster than any preceding design. She is the only dreadnought to be laid down and finished after 1925 - and the immense cost of building her puts a heavy strain on the German economy, which has already begun to struggle under the weight of colonial upkeep. As with the Dreadnought Race and the British Revolution, the Kaiser Wilhelm is not the cause of Black Monday, but she is a very definite contributing factor nonetheless. The emergence of carriers The British Revolution has also had another notable effect on naval development, beyond merely signalling the end of the Dreadnought Race. With the old Admiralty having fled to Canada, the board is cleared for a new generation of military leaders and planners, no longer enamoured with the old style of gun-armed warships but instead focusing on naval aviation. A lot of formerly lower-ranking personnel, including Frederick Rutland, “Rutland of Jutland”, saw great potential in the concept of the aircraft carrier, and now that they are the ones in charge, their ideas have the freedom to grow. The Republican Navy still fields a number of dreadnoughts, ships that were newly-built or almost finished at the time of the Revolution, out of sheer necessity, but all new shipbuilding efforts are focused on carriers and their escorts. In addition to regular carriers, which have been built the world over, the Republican Navy is very interested in developing the heavy carrier, huge floating airfields that can house dozens of planes, which can form the backbone of fleet operations all by themselves. In particular, one unfinished dreadnought hull, a monstrously huge ship, is selected to be modified as a one-off experimental design, dubbed RNS Rebecca. After an extensive construction project, the Rebecca is put into service as the flagship and the pride of the British fleet, a huge vessel with a tremendous capacity of over a hundred airplanes. No other ship like it exists in the world. Even though the dreadnought race is over, design efforts continue. The Kaiser Wilhelm is an absolute monster, too heavily armoured for even the last generation of Race dreadnoughts to deal with, carrying immensely powerful guns that should be more than capable of sinking any opposition. The UoB may be seeking to supplant gun-based warships with carriers, and Japan may be building its capital ships a size smaller since 1925, but many of the other major navies and aspiring naval powers still dream of building their own dreadnoughts again someday. Designs are ready in the US, Japan, and Canada that rival the Kaiser Wilhelm, and some Russian admirals and naval designers dream of having some of their own. It is still taken as a truism that the only thing that can beat a dreadnought, is another dreadnought, specifically a larger, more modern dreadnought, and so it is entirely possible that these oversized, massively armoured ships do still have a future. Category:Naval topics